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Forum talk:Structure Proposal
Place your reviews on the proposal in the various sections of the proposoal structure reproduced here. Current structure You're mostly correct in your analysis here. There are indeed articles from a smattering of various RPG sources. However, if you read the A original thread that spawned the creation of this Wiki, you'll find that the main goal is to create d20 system NPCs. From the d20 System website, this is dominantly Wizards of the Coast products, specifically D&D, d20 Modern, and Star Wars. Therefore, I feel the goal of an moderators of this forum should be maintaining structure for those systems (though we have no Star Wars at this time), and the extra systems are along for the ride. From a general quantitative stance, here's a fast breakdown: Based on the various systems' CR listing pages, there are 97 d20 Modern NPCs in the database, 448 d20 NPCs, 2 True20 NPCs, 336 Mutants and Masterminds, and 1 BESM NPC. --MidnightLightning 21:47, 18 April 2006 (UTC) Point ceded. --Wizardoest 01:30, 19 April 2006 (UTC) :Personally I do think a system that is self organizing is a much better idea. The roles and some of the other proposed structures were a bit too detailed but the current system isn't conductive to allowing NPCs to be easily posted (and found by people later).Graf 08:33, 21 April 2006 (UTC) ::Here's my thought. Keep the listing for "By CR", since that one is nicely organized so far. But the "By creature type" and "By character class" could probably simply use the categories... listing them manually in one place that's already mostly organized seems an easier task than putting it in three places. Fieari 19:20, 21 April 2006 (UTC) =Proposal= Using Categories to Self-Organize NPCs This has already been discussed, both pros and cons (yes, there are cons, which you don't seem to have considered) on this page. --MidnightLightning 21:47, 18 April 2006 (UTC) Category Structure I'm opposed to breaking things down this granularly, since the de facto way of doing it currently is, once a section gets too big for a flat article file, then a category gets created for it. If there aren't a lot of articles in the system for that game, there's going to be more pages used with Category descriptions for that system than NPCs for that system! I'd only suggest creating all these categories for the d20 section and the Mutants and Masterminds sections, since they're really the only two that are large enough to need this degree of granularity to find what you're looking for. --MidnightLightning 21:47, 18 April 2006 (UTC) 1. Organize by Gaming System 2a. Organize by CR 2b. Organize by Creature Type It sounds like you're suggesting six separate Creature type sections, with each creature belonging to two of them. This seems to go against your original goal of wanting to simplify the process of making a new NPC. With the old way you have to create the creature and then remember to go back and edit two other pages to cross-reference them. With the way you're proposing, you only edit one page, but you have to remember to add a string of Categories that's twice as long as the current method. --MidnightLightning 21:47, 18 April 2006 (UTC) 2c. Organize by Role See my above comment on adding complexity and more categories to the system. There are already a few flat file articles started which group together NPCs into various specialty groups (BBEG, Goody-to-shoes, Clerics, Demons, etc.). Personally, if I were coming here to browse and look for a Tank character, I'd much rather have the list be sorted by CR rather than alphabetically, which is what a Category would be. In Conclusion Large portions of what you have laid out is in place (at least in the d20 section of the wiki), and in other places, I question the need for this degree of control for so few articles. In those cases, the "up front" work would indeed be high, and indeed it would be the most action those sections have seen in a while, and would definitely not be worth the work, in my opinion. As far as time-saving, yes, there may be some time saving benefits here; provided you have the Category tree memorized and don't have to flip back and forth figuring out what the exact name of a particular Category is. Regarding usefullnes; if every index page was sorted alphabetically, and used the literal name of the article, I would find many of them less useful than they are now. CR categories would probably be the only categories that I'd want to see sorted alphabetically; all the rest should be by CR. And, all articles would have to have CR, race, and classes in the title of the article in order to have all relevant data visibile on the index pages (wheras with a flat file you can customize your title based on the index you're looking at), and this would make it harder to see at a glance the information you need, since titles would need to be quite long. There's been a few times where more structure was asked for on this Wiki, and the general response has always been to let it be and if a section grows too big to be useful as a flat file, then more structure is given to that section. I don't think there's a need to impose this much structure on the whole site at this time. --MidnightLightning 21:47, 18 April 2006 (UTC) It seems that there is a strong preference for maintaining "flat files" over Categories on this site. This proposal was only a proposal. I'll be continuing to contribute NPCs once the builds from my current campaign become nonrelevant. (A few of my gamers peek their heads over here from time to time.) --Wizardoest 01:40, 19 April 2006 (UTC)